CREATIVE LIVINGWhere average becomes extraordinary

Creative Living for Women. Big Ideas for us average folk...

Inspired by #BigMagic

“Creative entitlement doesn’t mean behaving like a princess, or acting as though the world owes you anything whatsoever. No, creative entitlement simply means believing that you are allowed to be here, and that—merely by being here—you are allowed to have a voice and a vision of your own.”

Creativity. It eludes us when we need it the most.

That deer in the headlight look we all get when we feel lost. We have a problem. A challenge. And the solution eludes us. That's when we need to dig our heels in and GET CREATIVE.

Silicone Society by Heather Culpepper

the following text is an excerpt from an essay I wrote in college for my visual culture class....

Society is saturated with sexual imagery. Everywhere you look someone is trying to sell you an idea or a concept. This is not without consequence. Oftentimes, visual culture has a negative impact on a person’s self-image, especially where women are concerned. The media, for the most part, does not reinforce a person’s psychological well being, rather, it reinforces the idea of perfection by objectifying women as sexual creatures. It’s all about the gaze, which, in traditional psychoanalytic theory, is linked to fantasy and desire.

According to Laura Mulvey’s essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, “Images of women often have been presented in ways that emphasize their status as sexual beings or maternal figures.”

Advertising sells us the idea or concept of perfection, when in reality there is no such thing. Many women try to live up to the ideal of being a “supermom” or someone who can do it all.

Sometimes, society can make us feel plastic.

In addition, each of us struggle with our identity growing up and many of us mistakenly believe that our bodies, and life, should be perfect. At least that’s the dream sold to us by advertising and mainstream film. We each have things that make us unique and sometimes those things tend to be viewed as flaws. Instead of being taught to celebrate our own unique brand of identity we are made to feel guilty if we are not living up to the unrealistic body images of models and A-list celebrities.

As a result of the impact of visual culture’s influence through advertising and film, many teenage girls develop eating disorders trying to conform to an image that the media has sold them. Anorexia, bulimia and other mental disorders are highly prevalent today. According to the South Carolina Department of Mental Health, 8 million Americans have an eating disorder. Lack of direction from parents, along with media influence, I believe, are to blame for this.

In Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, Rear Window, Jeff’s maid Stella noted that people ought to, “get outside their own house and look in for a change.” In this case, the house could be symbolized as the body. Most of us focus on the outer part of ourselves, which distracts us from looking inside at who we really are and finding our true identity.

In attempting to find out who they really are, young women struggle to find security in their appearance. More often than not we look to the images on television, on billboards, and in magazines to tell us what we should look like and what kind of car we should be driving. The prevailing notion is that the more expensive the clothes and the car, the more value we have.

WE ARE ALL VALUABLE

If you have never thought of yourself as creative, I challenge you to think about creativity as a passion. We create every day whether we are aware of it or not. We create families. We create homes. We create gardens. We create jobs. We create communities. We create all the damn time, we just don't give ourselves credit for it.

"Be brave. Without bravery, you will never know the world as richly as it longs to be known." -Elizabeth Gilbert

Being creative does not always mean drawing like Picaso. It does not always mean taking stunning portraits or making genius level designs. Think about the last time you had a problem and you solved it by thinking outside the box. That's creativity.

We all have useful tools within ourselves. We just have to look for them.

This woman clearly needed an ashtray. So, she made one. From a coconut. What have you used to repurpose with?

And so, creative woman, I bring to you our magazine, Creative Living for the Fearless Woman. No matter what you create - let it bring light to the world around you.

This magazine is inspired by you, and in part, by Elizabeth Gilbert's book -